News Release Number: STScI-2007-31

September 6, 2007: NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes have joined forces to discover nine of the
smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the distant universe. Blazing
with the brilliance of millions of stars, each of the newly discovered galaxies is a hundred
to a thousand times smaller than our Milky Way Galaxy. The bottom row of pictures shows
several of these clumps (distance expressed in redshift value). Three of the galaxies
appear to be slightly disrupted. Rather than being shaped like rounded blobs, they appear
stretched into tadpole-like shapes. This is a sign that they may be interacting and merging
with neighboring galaxies to form larger structures. The galaxies were observed in the
Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and the
Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer. Observations were also done with
Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera and the European Southern Observatory's Infrared
Spectrometer and Array Camera.